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IMHO ACDSee is better but it's not free. Hanama (Man I spelled it wrong before) is free.
ACDSee does have an issue if you keep your AVIs and your Manga in the same directory , it does a preview on the AVI and that might lock up your computer for 60 seconds.

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My Favorite Anime Quotes Courtesy of Answerman of ANN:

1) By and Large...they are ** and *****.
2) What kind of girls do Anime Otaku males want? ..................... Female.
3) The odds are good, that the goods are odd.

using comicviewer
no need to unzip / unrar pack, can also remember password
to read: simply right click the archive and choose comicviewer

convert from color mode to grayscale
split view: convert dual page scans to single page if needed
zoom to height or width with keyboard shortcuts or right click
allow basic b/w leveling and adjustment , without the need to PS them ...
allow bookmarking and configuring of shortcut keys as you want

i use CDisplay. It does everything I want it to do and more. First off, it resizes pictures so that the horizontal size just barely fits the screen. This achieves a fullscreen image no matter the size of the comic, and also insures that it's pretty readable. I use the mousewheel to surf and it works pretty well too.

Also, CDisplay has a 'Load Next Files' feature that is apparently pretty dang smart. It'll load the next chapter, but the thing is, if the next chapter isn't in that folder, it's smart enough to look for the next folder it'd be in. I was able to read several volumes of ichigo 100% that way, each volume in a different folder. CDisplay knew which folder to go to next everytime and always knew the order of the files to display. While showing them exactly how I want in fullscreen mode.

And finally, it can read through zips and rars, so I don't even have to unzip stuff.

There is literally nothing else I'd want a program to do (well except read zips inside of zips, which CDisplay doesn't seem to be able to do right now).

From what I recall, CDisplay has a problem with Japanese filenames, even when you have Windows configured for Japanese/East Asian languages. CDisplayEx fixes this somewhat (it recognizes files w/ Japanese filenames) but seems to be missing some features, like proper right-to-left two page display.

Not sure if I'm using the latest IRFanView, but it also seems to have trouble with Japanese filenames in its thumbnail browser.

I was trying to get hamana working on my new vista laptop, but it didn't seem to be playing well. I go to open a folder or zip file and all I get are a bunch of boxes in the hamana window with the filenames in them. I saw this app over at my friend's house and it looks pretty sweet, but it just doesn't seem to be working on vista for me. I did try running it in winxp SP2 compatibility mode, but that didn't help.

edit: I'm just an idiot, I tried hamana on another zip file today and it looks like it's working fine. I must have just picked a bad file for the single test I tried yesterday.

a) it won't force me to unzip / unrar the files, and
b) it allows me to give "ratings" to a particular file (from the scale of 1 - 5). Sometimes, I come across a page of a manga that is just so awesome, I have to read it again and again. The rating features come in very handy in this respect.

I've used cdisplay and it was fine, but i wanted something more advanced.

so i tested GonVisor, PicWalker, Hamana, Comical... etc.

hamana has nice page transition effects and good shortcuts but it crashed my system quite often.

picwalker has smooth continuous scrolling of multiple pages but it fails to load some archives for me if there is directory inside.

but recently i've discovered one brilliant piece of software for viewing comics/manga - it's called ComicRack.

used to reading manga with cdisplay for few years i was simply shocked how rich and feature-full that kind of program can ever be. i never imagined such software existed and that it's free and still actively developed with new features added at users wish (last version - September 30, 2007). it allows not only to view manga, but to manage and organize your comics database. i don't want to enlist all the features here, just try and test it yourself. you'll see...

It's probably best place to ask. For readind I use Irfanview, but it doesn't support files with japanese or chinese names. Is there any similar program like this with unicode name support?

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Once some one asked me where I came from. I just pointed behind myself. When the same person asked where I was heading, I just pointed towards the horizon I was looking at. "It's simple, I neither belong here nor there. I am just walking..."Current fandoms: RWBY - White Rose, Frozen - Elsanna and all previous.

I use an old free version of ACDsee (ACDsee Classic). It's just so simple and easy to use. I can go to full screen and back using the keyboard, no problem. And it's very light on system resources. But it does, very occasionally, choke on East Asian filenames.

I always found IrfanView quite unintuitive to use.

But I'm glad to revisit this thread and try some new programs. ComicRack looks interesting.

I'm not an avid reader of manga so I'm not really familiar with the intricacies and features of the different image viewing software on the market, but on my brief and admittedly few forays into mangaland I've found Comix to be a more than reliable companion.

It can view rar/zips without unzipping, and it's got sequential view. What more can I want really?

While I'm also a big GQView fan on Linux, I actually use Comix for reading manga. Works pretty well and has most of the major features you want from a manga reader (like right-left 2 page mode). My only complaint is that it can be slow to uncompress files and if it hits an error it simply crashes. Other than that it works great.

Does that one support Unicode? I use MangaMeeyaCE 2.4 beta which is a Mandarin branch that added unicode support (As some of my archives have japanese names).

The best thing I like about MM is that you can set it to have very aggressive caching when reading archives. Since my manga is on a networks drive through wireless G this becomes very important. I set the cache to 512MB (4GB Vista64).